Working Papers No. 134/10
Total Factor Productivity for the Royal
Navy from Victory at Texal (1653) to
Triumph at Trafalgar (1805)
.
Patrick Karl O’Brien FBA
&
Xavier Duran
© Patrick O’Brien, LSE
Xavier Duran, Northwestern
February 2010
Department of Economic History
London School of Economics
Houghton Street
London, WC2A 2AE
Tel:
Fax:
+44 (0) 20 7955 7860
+44 (0) 20 7955 7730
Total Factor Productivity for the Royal Navy from Victory at Texal
(1653) to Triumph at Trafalgar (1805) ∗
Patrick Karl O’Brien FBA and Xavier Duran
“It is upon the Navy under the providence of God that the
safety, honour and welfare of this realm do chiefly depend”
Preamble to articles for the first Anglo-Dutch war, 1652-54
Abstract
The size and strength of the Royal Navy experienced a punctuated
evolution into the largest and most powerful Navy in the world by
1815.
Most historians tend to represent its superiority in conflicts at sea as
an indication of several factors that would be conceptualized by
economists as residuals in a production function, namely: better
technologies, efficient seamanship, bravery in battle, the Nelson
factor, strong logistical support on shore and latterly well designed
systems of economic incentives. But are these factors anywhere
near sufficient to explain the Royal Navy's relative prowess over rival
fleets? This paper argues that the fiscal and financial institutions
based upon a political consensus for a sustained uplift in state
expenditures on the largest standing fleet of warships in Europe was
created during an interregnum of Republican rule, carried forward by
the Stuarts and exploited to reach its full potential between the
Glorious Revolution (1688) and the Congress of Vienna (1815). The
Royal Navy’s protection promoted development and consolidation of
the realm’s extensive maritime sector that, in turn, sustained the
largest fleet of battleships on call for defense and aggression in
Europe and across the oceans of the world economy.
One of the major unsolved (perhaps insoluble problems) in
European history is concerned with the design of a narrative, concluding
with a story that might explain the rise of the Royal Navy to a position of
∗
To be published in R. Unger (ed) Shipping, Efficiency and Economic Growth, 13501800 forthcoming Brill 2010. Not to be cited without permission from Patrick O’Brien
(p.o’[email protected])
1
hegemony over all other rival navies. That evolution and outcome
occurred between the first Anglo-Dutch War (1652-54) and final victory at
Trafalgar and Waterloo over the course of a Second Hundred Years War
with France from 1689-1815. 1 Thereafter, from the Congress of Vienna in
1815 to the entry of the United States into the Second World War, which
paradoxically flowed from the destruction of an American fleet at Pearl
Harbour by Japanese sea and airpower in 1941, Britain’s Royal Navy
held indisputable command over the oceans of the world. 2
There are two possible explanations for the Navy’s climb to that
position of hegemony. First (and with the recent publication of fiscal and
other scattered European–wide data recording and indicating
expenditures on navies), few modern naval historians would be prepared
to deny that a “very high” measure of significance must be accorded in
the narrative to the scale, scope and persistence of investment by the
British state in fleets of warships and their onshore infrastructure of ports,
docks, shipyards, bureaucratic organizations, specialized manpower , and
other inputs required for sea power. 3 Furthermore, that strategy pursued
for the national defence of an island realm, combined effectively with
private investment in the ships, weapons and on shore facilities of a
national merchant marine for commerce, but also for piracy, privateering
and other forms of predation upon foreign competitors to create a very
1
F. Crouzet, ‘The Second Hundred Years War with France. Some Reflexions? French
History, 10 (1996) pp. 432-50
2
P.K. O’Brien and A. Clesse (eds.), Two Hegemonies. Britain 1846-1914 and the
United States, 1941-2001 (Aldershot, 2002)
3
Nicholas Rodger writes: “British sea power benefitted essentially from a breadth and
depth of public support which had no equivalent in any other naval power”, N.A.M.
Rodger, ‘Queen Elizabeth and the Myth of Sea Power in English History’, Transactions
of the Royal Historical Society, 14 (2004), pp. 153-174. Although the concluding
chapter of his seminal work on the history of the Royal Navy (N.A.M. Rodger, The
Command of the Ocean. A Naval History of Britain. Vol. 2, 1649-1815, (London 2004)
pp. 575-83) supports the general points made in this paper, our emphases differ.
Rodger’s text contains many references to the Royal Navy’s superior efficiency over
the navies of rivals, particularly France, that may or may not turn out to be both valid
and significant.`
2
large scale European and global multinational shipping industry for the
kingdom. Private investment in a mercantile marine clearly supplemented
both the defensive and offensive operations of the Royal Navy.
Throughout the period from the Navigation Act of 1651 to victory at
Trafalgar, flows of resources, information and nautical knowledge
between the two sectors operated symbiotically. This connexion must
form the core of any history of British naval success from Cromwell to
Nelson, as well as a significant component of any rounded explanation for
the kingdom’s precocious industrialization. 4
The graphs set out below demonstrate that quantified
representations of the United Kingdom’s consistently high and rising
levels of public expenditures on the Royal Navy can: now be constructed
(Figure 1), compared with expenditures upon military force (Figure 2), and
albeit within an altogether less acceptable level of accuracy, juxtaposed
alongside outlays on gross domestic fixed capital formation by the private
sector for the growth of the economy. (Figure 3)
4
The argument is outlined in P.K. O’Brien. ‘Fiscal and Financial Preconditions for the
Rise of British Naval Hegemony 1485-1815’, in J. Backhaus and N. Rodger (eds.),
Navies and State Formation (forthcoming 2009). It will be elaborated in book form by
the authors of this paper, The Royal Navy and the First Industrial Revolution
(forthcoming 2010)
3
Figure 1: Trends in Expenditures on the Royal Navy 1569-1815 (Natural
Log of Real Expenditure in £000 in Constant Prices of 1660)
12
10
8
Nlog (20 MA) expendit ure
6
4
Nlog expenditure
2
1812
1801
1790
1779
1768
1757
1746
1735
1724
1713
1702
1891
1680
1669
1658
1647
1636
1625
1614
1603
1592
1581
1570
0
Sources: The database has been constructed by the authors from Official and
Secondary sources is available on request and will be included and referenced in their
book The Royal Navy and the Industrial Revolution (forthcoming 2010)
Notes: Nlog Expenditure: Natural logarithm of Royal Navy Expenditure in real 1660
pounds; Nlog 20 MA Expenditure: Natural logarithm of 20 year centred moving average
of Royal Navy Expenditure in real 1660 pounds
4
Figure 2. Proportions of Expenditures on Armed Forces Allocated to the Army
and Navy, 1689-1815
%age of Naval Expenditure
%age of Military Expenditure
80.0
70.0
60.0
50.0
40.0
30.0
20.0
10.0
0.0
1689-1697
(war)
1698-1701
(peace)
1702-1712
(war)
1713-1717
(peace)
1718-1721
(war)
1722-1739
(peace)
1740-1748
(war)
1749-1755
(peace)
1756-1763
(war)
1764-1775
(peace)
1776-1784
(war)
1785-1792
(peace)
Sources: See figure 1 and Parliamentary Paper 1868-69 (XXXV)
Figure 3. Expenditures on the Royal Navy Compared to Conjectures for
GDFCF, 1600-1815
*Sources: See Figure 1
5
1793-1815
(war)
Figures of comparable scope and quality have neither been
published nor collected, let alone calibrated into formats required for
systematic and reciprocal comparisons across a relevant sample of rival
states with serious commitments to naval power. Although recently
constructed estimates for expenditures undertaken by the Netherlands
and Spain, together with some un-quantified suggestions for France
support the view that between 1714-1800 both Bourbon monarchies
allocated far higher proportions of their revenues to armies than to navies
and that the absolute levels of expenditures on warships and onshore
infrastructural support for naval operations at sea but all three rival
powers not only fluctuated more sharply, decade after decade, but they
fell well below allocations made for the support of Britain’s Navy. 5
Furthermore, Martin Korner’s statistics for expenditures by
European states does not include any data to suggest that outlays by any
other rival power even begins to match British allocations for the realms’
Royal Navy. 6 While Jan Glete’s complementary research designed to
measure the displacement tonnage of all types of warships owned and
controlled by the English, French, Spanish, Dutch and other maritime
states between 1650 and 1815, clinches poorly quantified impressions
derived from fiscal data that the scale of the Island kingdom’s fleet of
5
For Spain, vide José Jurado Sanchez, ‘Military Spending, Spending Capacity and
Budget Constraints in Eighteenth Century Britain and Spain’, in Revista de Historia
Economica (2009) pp 141-74 and R. Torres Sanchez, ‘Possibilities and Limits: Testing
the Fiscal Military State in the Anglo-Spanish War of 1779-83’, in R. Torres Sanchez
(ed.), War, State and Development. Fiscal Military States in the Eighteenth Century
(Navarra, 2007), pp. 437-460. For France I relied upon H. Goherel, Les tresoiries
generaux de la Marine (Paris, 1965); M. Marion, Histoire Financière de la France
depuis 1715 (5 vols: Paris, 1927-18), and J. Riley, The Seven Years War and the old
Regime in France (Princeton, 1986). For the Netherlands we are grateful to Professor
Wantje Fritschy of the Free University of Amsterdam for allowing me to see her
unpublished estimates of naval expenditures 1701-94. For France, we are grateful for
the advice of Professors Joel Felix of Reading University and Daniel Baugh of Cornell
University.
6
M. Korner, ‘Expenditure’, in R. Bonney (ed.), Economic Systems and State Finance
(Oxford, 1995), pp. 393-404
6
battleships armed, specialized and maintained in a state of readiness for
warfare at sea first converged and then pulled sharply away from navies
maintained by rivals on the mainland as well as the great agrarian
empires of Asia. 7
Figure 4: Scale of Royal and other State Navies (displacement tonnage 000s)
800
700
England
600
500
400
France
300
200
Spain
100
Netherlands
1815
1800
1785
1770
1755
1740
1725
1710
1695
1680
1665
1650
1635
1620
1605
1590
1575
1560
1545
1530
1515
1500
0
Source: Glete, J. (1993) Appendix 2. Data corresponds to “Naval strength”. England
1500-1815, Netherlands 1650-1815, France 1620-1815 and Spain 1715-1815.
Figures for the numbers and tons of armed merchant vessels,
corsairs and privateers predating upon enemy (and neutral) merchant
marines in wartime have not been published. 8 Nevertheless histories of
British, French, Dutch, Iberian and other European trades, which include
odd references to data on exports and imports by country, suggest Britain
began to move to the top of European league tables for trade combined
with shipping after 1660. Unverifiable estimates for the tonnage of ships
7
J. Glete, Navies and Nations: Warships, Navies and State Building in Europe and
America 1500-1860 (2 vols. Stockholm, 1993), appx 2.
8
J.S. Bromley, Corsairs and Navies (London, 1987) and J. Thompson, Mercenaries,
Pirates and Sovereignty (Princeton, 1994)
7
included in European mercantile navies, all suggest that the scale and
scope of the merchant ships accumulating under British ownership and
management also exceeded the capacities for seaborne transportation
available to any of its mainland rivals, including eventually the
Netherlands by large and ever diverging margins. 9
Figure 5. Tonnage of Ships and Number of Sailors Employed in the Maritime
sectors (Navy + Merchant Marine) of England and the Netherlands 1575-1825
1575
1600
1625
1650
1675
1700
1725
1750
1775
1800
1825
Tonnage
English
68,433
210,000
350,000
Seamen
English
16,000
Dutch
240,000
400,000
Dutch
33,000
46,000
50,000
900,000
55,000
500,000
500,000
700,000
1,856,000
2,202,000
50,000
70,000
70,000
95,000
397,000
130,792
45,000
24,000
Source: English tonnage and seamen and Dutch tonnage (Lucassen & Unger (2000))
and Dutch seamen (Davids (1997))
Finally disparate and unverifiable references to the numbers of
vessels owned or leased by “hostile” powers that were destroyed and
captured in times of war do not suggest that the kingdom’s geopolitical
rivals and commercial competitors compensated for markedly lower
investments in warships by calling upon larger fleets of privateers or well
9
It is difficult to construct a European-wide table of the tonnage of ships available by
country for private seaborne commerce and transportation because data for several
countries are not available. Furthermore definitions of mercantile marines vary by
country and over time, and measures used to report tonnage are not consistent across
countries or time. Vide, J. McCusker, Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic
World (London, 1997)
8
armed merchant marines. 10 All the evidence suggests a long term and
growing divergence in the size of the navies and mercantile marines of
the United Kingdom compared to its rivals and competitors from the
mainland of Europe and the Ottoman, Mughal and Qing empires of Asia
as well. 11
Economists will point to the probabilities that high, consistent and
complementary investments by the public and private sectors in the ships,
infra-structural capital and manpower required to keep naval and
merchant marines “ship shape” for both warfare and commerce, would, in
theory, generate several kinds of positive inter-connexions, all rigorously
specified and labelled under such enticing taxonomies as agglomeration
effects, network externalities and general purpose technologies. 12
Historians will only agree that modern theories seem plausible, provide
some graphic vocabulary, as well as a few examples, although they
could not actually measure the increasing returns that undoubtedly
accompanied and added to flows of benefits from Britain’s sustained
commitment to a maritime strategy (1651-1805) for the combined defence
and development of the Island kingdom. Nevertheless that strategy must
be accorded a place of a real significance in explanations for the realm’s
precocious transition, first to a commercialized and then to an industrial
economy. Capital formation undertaken by the state, working in close
cooperation with the private sector, in sailing ships, ports, docks, cannon,
skilled manpower, the navigational knowledge and commercial
10
J. Levy, Wars in the Modern Great Power System, 1495-1975 (Lexington, 1983)
L. Harper, The English Navigation Laws (New York, 1939) and G. Modelski and W.
Thompson, Seapower in Global Politics (Seattle, 1993)
12
M. Fujita, P. Krugman and A. Venables (MIT Press, Cambridge., 2000); H. Helpman
(ed.), General Purpose technologies (MIT Press, Cambridge, 1998); J. Triole, The
Theory of Industrial Organization (MIT Press, Cambridge, 2000)
11
9
organization required for international trade, combined symbiotically with
national defence and mercantilist warfare at sea. 13
Yet there has also been a clear and persistent strand of, let us call
it patriotic writing about the Navy, well supported by references to
bellicose politicians as well as xenophobic Britons of the day. That history
has been consolidated by into an all too rarely controverted national myth
that continues to represent the manifest successes of the Royal Navy
over a long sequence of some ten major wars (1652-1802-15) as a record
of superior efficiency and organization over the fleets of the Netherlands,
Spain, France, Denmark, Russia, the United States and other rivals in
conflicts at sea. Too many historians continue to offer such underspecified and under-quantified explanations for success that downgrade
the significance of resources.
Unfortunately the Royal Navy’s relative efficiency could never be
validated or invalidated by fitting anything approximating to production
functions to the achievements of a sample of rival European navies. In
theory production functions measure relative levels of success in
converting inputs of capital, labour and other resources into variegated
“outputs” of “public goods” such as external security, protection for the
mercantile marine, colonization, the transportation of troops, victories in
battles at seas, successful diplomatic threats and other elements of an
interrelated set of multiple objectives serving national interests. 14
Another potential but less rigorous, demanding and inconclusive
approach to the problem of British naval efficiency is to proceed by way of
systematic and reciprocal comparisons to at least clarify the precise
13
P.K. O’Brien, ‘Provincializing the First Industrial Revolution’, Department of
Economic History, London School of Economics GEHN Working Paper 23/06 (2006)
14
This was appreciated by N.A.M. Rodger, ‘Form and Function in European Navies,
1660-1815’ in L. Akveld et al (eds.,) in In het kielzog: Maritiem-historische Studies
(Amsterdam, 2003) pp. 85-97 and N.A.M. Rodger, ‘Sea Power and Empire’, in P.
Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol.2 (Oxford, 1998), p. 169183
10
location and possible significance of particular examples of the relative
prowess embodied in rival navies. Such comparisons rarely appear,
however, in the voluminous and scholarly bibliography for European naval
history, because that library has been largely constructed upon a country
by country basis, often without adequate reference to the volume, value
and quality of resources placed at the disposal of all national navies for
the various missions that they undertook to achieve the multiple
objectives defined by monarchs, oligarchies and their advisers. 15
Simply to expose an under-exploited potential for comparative
history, to assist a growing group of European naval historians who are
providing research into the relative logistical efficiencies of national
navies, and as a challenge to scholars who are bunkered in national
archives, two “outsiders” from economic history propose to formulate a
provisional and contestable argument, based largely upon English
secondary sources, that the extant and largely a priori case made for the
ostensibly superior efficiency of the British navy is at present unproven.
Furthermore, it appears to them that its margins of efficiency over rival
navies from 1653-1805 were in all probability rather small. If this turns
out to be correct, it implies that Britain’s rise to a position of geopolitical
hegemony was the product of access to a higher volume of fiscal and
financial resources, allocated to build up an almighty navy. 16
Effective naval power emanated as the outcomes of “systems”
established, funded and maintained by states for the mobilization,
combination and coordination of several analytically separable inputs
required for a range of different national objectives, for example, the
15
M. Acerra et al (eds.,) Les marines de guerre européenes XVII-XVIIIe siecles (Paris,
1998) and L. Sondhaus, Naval Warfare 1815-1914 (London, 2001)
16
Europe’s naval historians have latterly become more engaged with comparative
history. M. Acerra and A. Zysberg, L’esssor des marines de guerre européenes vers
1680-vers 1790 (Paris, 1997) and R. Knight, ‘The Fleets of Trafalgar: The Margin of
Superiority’, in D. Cannadine (ed.), Trafalgar in History (New York, 2006) pp. 61-78
11
Royal Navy’s absolute priority was to preclude invasion of the Isles by
sea. Its secondary missions included protection for the realm’s
international commerce, extensive fishing industry and coastal trades;
predation upon enemy and other potentially hostile commerce in wartime;
offshore support for allies and colonies; the transportation of troops, the
bombardment of enemy bases, coastal fortification and maritime cities;
the containment of smuggling and backing for gunboat diplomacy. 17
Clearly the scale and scope of the principal capital goods in the
form of national armed sailing fleets evolved gradually to include a mix of
capabilities required to perform several and specialized tasks. Heavily
armed cruisers could not be expected to pursue and intercept the cutters
used by smugglers to deliver cargoes of illegal merchandise to the home
market. Thus, the mix of capabilities embodied in warships constructed
and/or commissioned for service by the Royal Navy, and for that matter
all other European navies must be related for purposes of comparison to
their evolving and differentiated missions on behalf of states.
By the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the tonnage of faster and
lighter frigates, sloops, brigs and cutters at the disposal of the Royal Navy
as a proportion of the total tonnage, had risen sharply from around 15%
in 1710 to 43% a century later. 18 These ratios indicate that the security of
the realm provided by larger scale, heavily armed ships of the line,
strategically positioned off shore probably absorbed a diminishing but still
cost effective proportion of total expenditures on the Navy. Given the high
probability of increasing returns to combined public and private
investment in capital goods for maritime operations, an island power
could, over time, maintain external security by allocating reduced shares
17
D. Baugh, ‘Great Britain’s Blue Water Policy, 1689-1815’, in International History
Review, X (1988), pp. 33-58
18
R.W. Unger, ‘Warships, cargo ships and Adam Smith: trade and government in the
eighteenth century’, The Mariner’s Mirror, 92, 1 (2006). 41-59 and R. Harding, The
Evolution of the Sailing Navy, 1509-1815 (Basingstoke, 1995)
12
of the fiscal and financial resources available to its armed forces for that
key purpose and reallocate a rising proportion to other more profitable
mercantilist objectives, as well as that other all important public good –
the maintenance of internal order. (Vide Figure 2)
At present historians of the British navy have offered little by way of
hard evidence to suggest that the mix of warships available to rival fleets
of France, Spain and other powers were sub-optimal for the strategic
objectives pursued by their rulers. 19 They have not, moreover, been able
to demonstrate that warships built in the Hanoverian states own or in
private yards for service in the Royal Navy were either of consistently
superior designs for comparable purposes, included more effective
energy systems, that is sails, masts, rigging, rudders and pumps for the
harnessing of wind and water power, or deployed more technologically
advanced ordnance than rival warships charged with similar missions. 20
Although no other state relied anywhere nearly as much as Britain upon
its navy for external security or sought as consistently and tenaciously to
secure command of the seas, the limited range of modern secondary
sources for European-wide comparisons do not demonstrate that British
built warships and their guns enjoyed protracted periods of technological
advantage over ships built and cannon cast in yards and foundries from
other parts of the continent. 21
On the contrary, it has not been difficult for historians of the Royal
Navy to cite a long list of complaints and anxieties which refer to the
19
N.A.M. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean, a Naval History of Britain, vol. 2,
1649-1815 (London, 2004)
20
B. Lavery, Ships of the Line. The Development of the Battlefleet 1650-1850 (London,
1983), and B. Lavery, The Arming and Fitting of English Ships of War 1660-1815
(London, 1987)
21
B. Lavery, Nelson’s Navy. The Ships, the Men and Organization 1793-1815 (London,
1989) and N.A.M. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean. A Naval History of Britain, vol.
2, 1649-1815 (London, 2004) and L.D. Ferreiro, Ships and Science. The Birth of Naval
Architecture (Cambridge, Mass, 2006)
13
qualities of warships built in French and Spanish yards. 22 Contemporaries
who made such invidious comparisons did not, however, consistently
compare like with like or consider the trade-offs involved in the
construction of ships for speed, which was a French preoccupation, for
convoy duties across the Atlantic which was a Spanish priority, and for
the durability required to remain for long periods at sea in all weathers
and to engage enemies at close quarters in duals of strength and
endurance, which were the essential prerequisites for both the strategy
and the formalist line ahead tactics for the battles the Royal Navy
endeavoured, in principle, to pursue between 1689 and 1815. 23
All European warships embodied variations in their capacities for
speed, manoeuvrability, endurance, firepower and for facilities
accommodating large crews in confined and unhealthy spaces to sail
ships and fire cannon. As floating fortresses European warships
increased in scale and capabilities to carry one to three decks of 32 to
over 100 guns, to remain stable on the waves and to withstand the
concentrated impact of heavy cannon balls weighing 9lbs to 42lbs.
Shipwrights tried to maintain balances between the weight of cannon, the
height and complexities of rigging and the size and shape of hulls. Big
warships took several years to build and could remain on active duty for
up to and, in some cases (with refits) for more than 20 years. To remain
22
C. Wilkinson, The British Navy and the State in the Eighteenth Century (London,
2004) ; D.H. Roberts (ed.), Eighteenth Century Shipbuilding. Remarks on the Navies of
the English and the Dutch (Rotherfield, 1992) and J. Meyer and M. Acerra, Histoire de
la Marine Francaise des Origines a nos Jours (Rennes, 1994)
23
D. Baugh, ‘The Eighteenth Century Navy as a National Institution in J. Hill (ed.),
Oxford Illustrated History of the Royal Navy (Oxford, 1995); J. Boudriot and H. Berti,
L’art Ilerie de mer: marine francaise 1650-1850I (Paris, 199) and ; D. Goodman,
Spanish Naval Power 1589-1665 (Cambridge, 1996)
14
at sea ships required regular triennial servicing in dockyards ashore and
complete refits at least every 4-5 years. 24
Throughout the age of sailing fleets the design and construction of
warships and their ordnance occurred within the framework of two
competitive multinational industries: shipbuilding and armaments. Both
seem to have been marked by slow incremental rates of technical
innovation and compared to other sectors of manufacturing industry, a
relatively rapid diffusion of available knowledge, skills and techniques.
Those features moved both state and mercantile marines to broadly
similar levels of technological efficiency. 25 Diffusion occurred through
purchase and hire, but often b y way of the capture of foreign models as
well as the migration of shipwrights, seamen and gun founders across
frontiers. 26 Evidence suggests that the British navy derived some
temporary competitive advantages from a relatively rapid deployment of
copper sheathing and from investment in dry docks that preserved ships
timbers and speeded up completion and turnabout times for the building,
repair, cleaning and maintenance of hulls. 27 Some proportion of the guns
mounted on ships of the Royal Navy on service during the wars from
24
O. Warner, Fighting Sail: Three Hundred Years of Warfare at Sea (London, 1979)
and B. Lavery, Ships of the Line. The Development of the Battlefleet 1650-1850
(London, 1983)
25
D. Lyon, The Sailing Navy. All the Ships of the Royal Navy. Built, Purchased and
Captured (Conway, 1993) and
B. Lavery, The Arming and Fitting of English Ships of War 1660-1815 (London, 1987)
26
B. Lavery (ed.), The Ships of the Line (2 vols, London 1983-84); J. Glete, Navies and
Nations: Warships, Navies and State Building (Stockholm, 1993) and R. Unger, Dutch
Shipbuilding before 1800 (Amsterdam, 1978)
27
D. Baugh, ‘Naval power. What gave the British Navy Superiority?’ in L. Prados De La
Escosura (ed.), Exceptionalism and Industrialization. Britain and its European Rivals
1688-1815 (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 235-57; R. Knight, ‘The Introduction of Copper
Sheathing into the Royal Navy, 1779-86’, in Mariners Mirror, 59 (1973) pp, 299-309
and R. Knight, ‘The Building and Maintenance of the British Fleet during the AngloFrench Wars 1688-1815’, in M. Acerra et at (eds.), Les Marines de Guerre
Européenes. XVII-XVIIIe siecles (Paris, 1985), pp. 35-50
15
1776 to 1815 may have been superior to enemy cannon. 28 In general,
and given the multinational nature of Europe’s shipbuilding, shipping and
armaments industries, the modern secondary literature dealing with early
modern warships and naval artillery does not prima facie support a case
for sustained and cumulative technological leadership enjoyed by Britain
either in the construction of warships or in the design, manufacture and
mounting of cannon for more accurate delivery of destructive energy at
safer distances, over the period it took for the Royal Navy to achieve
command of the oceans. 29
At the very least, while its significance remains an open question
for research and debate, technological retardation appears to be
something of a short chapter in conceivable explanations for the failures
of Britain’s rivals to contain the long run success of the Royal Navy as the
instrument of what many European statesmen and commentators of the
age regarded as “maritime despotism”. 30 An alternative explanation is that
more of the Royal Navy’s triumphs at sea could be attributed, as many
naval historians are disposed to argue, to the superior skills of British
seamen, the leadership and managerial qualities of their officers and to
features of organization aboard the floating fortresses that might be
represented as “British” and virtually particular to the operation of
warships by the Royal Navy.31
Before investigating the potential quality of British seamen,
something quantitative and familiar should be repeated about Europe’s
28
B. Lavery, Nelson’s Navy, the Ships, Men and Organization 1793-1815 (London,
1989) and N.A.M. Rodger, Command of the Oceans, pp. 420-422.
29
My generalization is based on the fine scholarship of Brian Lavery, Dan Baugh,
Nicholas Rodger and a collection of articles edited by R.D. Smith, British Naval
Armaments (London, 1989) plus J. Boudriot and H. Berti, L’artillence de mer. Marine
Franchise 1650-1850 (Paris, 1992)
30
A. Harvey, A Collision of Empires. Britain in Three World Wars, 1793-1945 (London,
1992)
31
B. Lavery (ed.), Shipboard Life and Organization 1731-1815 (Aldershot, 1998). Dan
Baugh in a letter to me in ??? to this view
16
evolving stocks and supply curves for this scarce category of labour.
Once again it is unfortunate that statistics for the changing size and
occupational distribution of seamen available to Venice, Portugal,
Holland, Spain, France, Sweden, Denmark, Prussia, Russia, the Ottoman
Empire and other states with ambitions to acquire naval power cannot be
tabulated here. Nevertheless, any review of published, but again, largely
descriptive, studies of Europe’s early modern trade overseas suggests
that the “pools” of seamen engaged directly and indirectly with all forms of
waterborne transportation could already have been larger for England
and its colonies than from anywhere on the mainland, even before the
promulgation of the First Navigation Act by the Republic in 1651.
Thereafter, British supplies of manpower and other resources linked to all
forms of economic and geopolitical activities at sea increased in line with
the growth of the kingdom’s exports, imports, re-exports, coastal, riverine
and fishing trades, as well as warfare at sea. For the manning and control
of warships, the Royal Navy could draw upon an ever increasing stock of
human capital embodied in seamen and officers from the realm’s and the
empire’s expanding merchant marine which increased in scale from an
estimated 340,000 tons of ships in 1686 to 1,200,000 tons in 1790. 32
With the possible exception of the Dutch navy, which used higher
wages to recruit sailors from the maritime regions of Germany,
Scandinavia and Russia, as well as the Netherlands, supplies of seamen
potentially available to all navies seem to have been an omnipresent and
widespread problem. 33 . Nevertheless, for Britain the supply remained
elastic enough to man larger and larger fleets with seamen from the
32
J. Lucassen and R. Unger. “Labour Productivity in Ocean Shipping 1500-1850”,
International Journal of Maritime History, XII, 2 (2000), 127-141, and the manpower
data cited in several articles in P.C. van Royen, J.R. Bruijn and J. Lucassen, eds.,
Those Emblems of Hell 1580-1870. Sailors and the Maritime Labour Market (St Johns,
1997)
33
D. Baugh, “The Eighteenth Century Navy as a National Institution”, in J. Hill (ed.),
Oxford Illustrated History of the Royal Navy (Oxford, 1995), pp. 120-60
17
realm’s merchant marine who were readily re-employed by the private
sector at the end of conflicts. 34 This well recognized allocation and
reallocation of manpower between the merchant and Royal Navy carried
advantages for both the security of the kingdom and growth of its
economy. 35 Seamen, both officers and men, remained at sea in times of
war and peace over long stretches of their working lives, acquiring skills
and accumulating relevant experience. Between the navy and the
merchant marine connexions remained virtually continuous, which
certainly promoted flows of tacit but useful and productive knowledge.
Across the board the public services and private enterprise shared the
costs of training able seamen, gunners, navigators, masters and
commanders. Furthermore, the redeployment of the king’s sailors
obviated those familiar problems of disorder and crime associated with
the demobilization of troops embodying redundant skills and expertise in
violence at the end of the wars. 36
Unsurprisingly the historiography concerned with the crews of
warships continues to be inordinately concerned with officers, particularly
admirals. Only a handful of books contains research into the relative
skills, pay, experience and motivation of able, ordinary and other seamen
who often served in several European, including the British navies and
merchant marines over this period. 37
A priori economic theory it is true is designed for the analysis of
modern free labour markets. Nevertheless, that theory should certainly
not lead historians to any expectation that methods favoured by the
British Admiralty for recruitment and payment of sailors, methods which
remained virtually unreformed throughout decades of victories at sea,
34
R. Davis, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the 17th and 18th Centuries
(Newton Abbot, 1972) and R. Hope, A New History of British Shipping (London, 1990)
35
G. Scammel, Seafaring, Sailors and Trade 1450-1750 (Aldershot, 2003) Chs 4 and 5
36
C. Emsley, Crime and Society in England 1750-1900 (Basingstoke, 1987)
37
P. Earle, Sailors. English Merchant Seamen 1650-1775 (London, 1998)
18
could be represented as “superior” for the employment, commitment,
training and efficiency of the workforces that manned warships in the
service of the Royal Navy, that is compared to jobs in the merchant
marine or other European navies and merchant marines. 38
On the contrary, published evidence on wages and conditions of
employment offered to British crews of warships suggest that few men
with the experience and skills required for work at sea could have been
attracted on economic grounds to serve the Crown in times of peace and
fewer still during periods of war when differentials in pay and conditions of
employment on merchant ships engaged in trade, and still more
employed in armed vessels active in privateering, looked far better than
anything on offer from the Royal Navy. 39
For example, and at the outbreak of every war, wages of seamen in
the merchant marine rose sharply to reflect uplifts in the risks and costs in
transporting merchandise by sea as well as the impact of intensified
demands from the Royal Navy for the thousands of extra seamen
required to man the fleet commissioned for immediate active service and
in anticipation of future demands from warships under accelerated
construction. 40 Until the mutinies of 1797 Parliament maintained the real
wage rates of ordinary and able seamen, which included food, medical
treatment, deferred pay, with no provision for clothing, at levels fixed in
1652 though revised in detail in 1686. Over time the regulated diets of
fresh food, cleaner spaces and safety available on the king’s warships
compared favourably with conditions provided by smaller, more
vulnerable and perhaps less healthy ships of the merchant navy.
38
The secondary sources are far from adequate. But vide: J.S. Bromley (ed.), The
Manning of the Royal Navy
1693-1873 (London, 1974) and J. Glete, Navies and Nations
39
S. Gradish, The Manning of the British Navy during the Seven Years War (London,
1980) and D. Baugh, ‘The Eighteenth Century Navy as a National Institution’, pp. 120160.
40
P. Earle, Sailors, English Merchant Seamen 1650-1775
19
Nevertheless, mariners who continued to work in the private sector could
not be subjected to the same discipline, including harsh penalties such as
mandatory death for eight crimes, optional for another eleven and
commonplace floggings for a variety of offences; far longer periods of
confinement aboard ships; out in all seasons and often on unhealthy
stations in tropical waters or even in home ports where leave ashore
occurred at the discretion of captains.41
Although conditions improved over time and a pay rise of 23%
which followed the mutinies of 1797 and a further 16% came on stream a
year after Trafalgar, no economist comparing wage differentials and
conditions for employment across the two marines, could be surprised
that a majority of the workforce who defended the realm, its property,
religion, freedoms and system of parliamentary governance from French
and other “despotisms” on the mainland consisted of a majority of
seamen who had, by one means or another, been impressed, that is
coerced, into serving their king and country and were only released for
leave during or at the end of conflicts at the discretion of the Royal Navy.
Tom Paine and other radicals of the time pointed to the anomaly, but
mariners were by no means the only occupation or social group among
Britain’s eighteenth century workforce, burdened by loss of autonomy and
the maintenance of strict controls over labour. 42
Parliaments grumbled, but refused that is before passing quota
acts in 1795, to emulate French policies of registration and systematic
conscription, let alone countenance Dutch systems of paying market
wages. Ministers recognized that the inefficiencies associated with
impressment operated as a self-reinforcing institution that at one and the
41
C. Lloyd, The British Seaman: A Social Survey (London, 1968) and N. Eder, Crime
and Punishment in the Royal Navy of the Seven Years War 1755-1763 (Aldershot,
2004)
42
M. Lewis, A Social History of the Navy 1793-1815 (London, 1960)
20
same time forced up wages for the mercantile marine and reduced
incentives for the Royal Navy to save scarce labour. Nevertheless,
Parliament legislated only to circumscribe the operations of this attack on
free labour in ways that mediated between the increasing and urgent
needs of the navy with the competitive, but economically, pressing
demands of overseas and internal trade upon which the tax revenues of
the state also depended. For example, the law limited liability for
impressments to mariners who, except at critical moments of “embargoes
on trade”, as in 1717 and 1779, could not be forcibly removed from
employment on outbound merchant ships, fishing vessels, colliers, ferries,
boats servicing naval demands for food and raw materials or only with
difficulty from colonial shipping. 43 Sensibly, apprehended smugglers
were sent to sea, but the Admiralty retained antipathies towards criminals
and other “misfits” that the poor law and other local authorities offered for
service. The Navy did recruit and train a considerable number of boys
from the lower classes and transformed an unknown number of
landsmen taken by press gangs into seamen. It also increased supplies
of trained labour available to the maritime sector of the economy as
ordinary or even as able seamen, over spells of intensive training for
those men and boys, 3-6 months, in a “boarding” school which was a
warship at sea that it took to produce a competent mariner.
The skills required to operate the energy systems of warships, that
is their top and mainsails, took far more training and experience to
acquire. So did the technical know-how of carpenters, coopers, caulkers,
rope makers, bakers, cooks, coxswains, boatswains, armourers, other
artisans and, above all, lead gunners found among the recognized and
differentially remunerated hierarchy of skills employed abroad all
43
C. Wilkinson, The British Navy and the State in the Eighteenth Century (London,
2006)
21
European warships. Over the long run impressments worked out because
the number of seamen in service rose from 48,000 in 1713 to 327,000 a
century later and the ratio of foreigners aboard ships of the Royal Navy,
still around 15% at that time, had fallen sharply from the years of King
William’s war in the 1690s.
44
Nevertheless, manning the fleet remained
as the key problem confronting the Admiralty throughout the period of
Britain’s rise to hegemony at sea. To cope with periodic but sudden
demands for large numbers of extra men, the Navy supplemented
impressments with incentives, including: bounties to all who
“volunteered”, promoting able seamen to petty officer levels, allowing
seamen derisory shares in prize money and opportunities to serve under
captains of their choice, in order to attract labour of the required calibre to
“volunteer” and to remain on duty with the King’s fleet. Yet on any ex post
inspection the incentives offered to seafarers and other men under threat
of impressments do not look enticing. 45 The bounties paid to “volunteers”
who “enlisted” amounted to around one third of a year’s wages for an able
seaman, 22% for an ordinary seaman and 11% for a landsman. There
was also a possibility of receiving , along with the rest of a fortunate crew,
a personal share of the meagre 12.5% of the total imputed value of
enemy ships, guns and cargoes allocated to seamen abroad warships
lucky enough to capture prizes. For example, the men who fought at
Trafalgar took home about £10 each. The incentives offered to the
workforce as a whole do not appear to be anything like as attractive as
rewards offered to officers. Although seamen could, and did, compete to
be promoted to warrant officers and become eligible for an enhanced
share of the prize money allocated for the destruction, or better still, the
capture of enemy warships or merchant vessels at sea. They also look
44
D. Baugh, ‘The Eighteenth Century Navy’, pp. 120-160
C. Prendergast, ‘The provision of incentives in firms’, in Journal of Economic
Literature, 37 (1999), pp. 7-63
45
22
much less attractive than either the booty that privateers could expect to
expropriate on risky voyages of predation or the higher wages, softer
discipline and guaranteed spells ashore for seamen who avoided press
gangs and remained with the merchant marine. 46
Incentives helped, but the regime for impressments coupled with
severe punishments for desertion remained vital for manning the fleets of
warships and their increasing complement of cannon, maintained in
commission and at sea for ever longer spells throughout the eight wars
fought by the kingdom between 1689 and 1815. Jobs and service with
the Royal Navy promoted some accumulation of human capital, including
skills and self-discipline, utilized for the development of an interdependent
maritime, urban and industrial economy. But for this age of mercantilism
and warfare it was the effective defence of the homeland, victories at sea
and a succession of favourable peace treaties that provided most of the
essential geopolitical and institutional preconditions for the continued
expansion of the country’s exports, imports and re-exports which
promoted a cumulative process of expansion for Britain’s shipping and
shipbuilding industries. By the Seven Years War, if not before, the capital
and manpower employed in this sector had already matured into the
largest scale industry for maritime enterprise in Europe. Symbiotic
connexions of the merchant marine with the Royal Navy and to national
defence allowed for allocations and reallocations of manpower between
the services with increasing facility and on a scale that could not be
matched by rival powers and economies from the mainland.
Perhaps as many naval historians and recently an American
economist assert, the crews aboard British warships might have been
more skilful and better motivated in the performance of their “duties” than
46
D. Benjamin and C. Thornberg, ‘Organization and Incentives in the Age of Sail’, in
Explorations in Economic History, 2 (2007), pp. 317-41, and D.J. Starkey, British
Privateering Enterprise in the Eighteenth Century (Exeter, 1990)
23
French, Spanish, Dutch and other sailors. Nevertheless, any survey of
pay, including prize money, prospects for promotion and other conditions
of employment for a workforce recruited and run by the British state under
a regime of coercion and servitude transfers the onus of proof to those
who make such theoretically implausible assertions and often without
reference to the marine sectors of rival countries. 47
At present few comparative histories concerned with the motivation
and skills of seamen are available. 48 Meanwhile contrasts are more
readily documented by referencing published historical research into the
officer corps of the Royal and other navies. Officers were responsible for
maintaining and improving organizational structures and established
practices for the management of warships, for ordnance and for their
crews of young potentially insubordinate men with ostensibly strong
incentives to shirk, free ride, play for safety and to risk desertion.
Unless male bonding, pride, loyalty and patriotism and other touted
propensities of jack tars are recognized as significant for the efficiency of
crews working and living together in the highly regimented confines of
British warships, the “weight” of incentives designed by the Admiralty to
elicit high standards of performance at sea seem to have been
concentrated to an overwhelming degree upon a hierarchy of professional
officers. 49 Most of these young men were from gentry or middling orders
of society and, increasingly as time passed, a rising proportion came from
“naval families”. Some, but not many and usually from up the social scale
entered the service after three years education at the Royal Naval
Academy established in 1737. The majority aspiring to be upwardly
47
P.C. Van Royen et al (eds.), Those Emblems of Hell European Sailors in the
Maritime Labour market 1570-1870’
48
K. Davids, ‘Maritime Labour in the Netherlands’ and S. Palmer and D. Williams,
‘British Sailors 1775-1870’ in Van Royen et al (eds.), Those Emblems of Hell.
49
D. Syrett and P.M. Di Nardo, The Commissioned Sea. Officers of the Royal Navy
(London, 1994)
24
mobile enlisted as midshipmen at ages between 12 and 15 and without
payment of premia normally demanded for training in other professions.
Over a period of six to seven years English, Scottish, Irish and Welsh
youths acquired the knowledge and became experienced and qualified
enough in navigation, the handling of sails and rigging, gunnery,
seamanship and leadership to sit the examination for promotion to the
rank of lieutenant and to become “eligible” to command a warship. The
acquisition of the range of skills required to sail, navigate and enter
battles which involved the coordination of complex structures, sailing on
choppy waters, using unpredictable energy systems, superintending
ships loaded with ordnance and enclosed with crews of hundreds of “unfree” seamen aboard floating fortresses of different “rates”, that is of
varied types, sizes and capacities – must have been no small managerial
achievement. 50
To display competence in an examination became a necessary, but
hardly a sufficient condition for promotion. Strong recommendations from
the candidates’ captains and confirmation from the Admiralty were also
required, before young men around the age of 20 received certification to
run their own ships. Thereafter, calls to command only came to the
minority who secured patronage and preferment, primarily from their
professional peers within the Navy, but for an unmeasured but possibly
non-trivial number of cases also through the influence of aristocrats and
politicians of the day. 51 Although only a tiny percentage of officers ever
climbed from the ranks to commissioned officers, within the constraints of
this ancien regime the Royal Navy seems to have moved further up the
ladder towards meritocracy than the army and most other agencies of
50
N.A.M. Rodger, The Wooden World. An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (New York,
1986)
51
M. Palmer, ‘The Sails Right Hand: Command and Control in the Age of Fighting Sail,
1652-1827’, in Journal of Military History, 61 (1997) pp. 679-765 and D. Baugh, The
Eighteenth Century Navy, pp. 120-160.
25
state, that is except for the department of Excise. According to several
authorities, the hierarchy in charge of running the Navy remained less
inclined to select management teams in charge of expensive warships on
grounds of birth and resisted or manipulated politicised and aristocratic
systems of preferment, more effectively and consistently than the
admiralties of Spain, Venice, Portugal, Denmark and France but only
before the Revolution, but not Holland or the United States. 52 Their views
are not, however, based on the range of and depth of comparative
historical research to be anything more than conjectures.
Whether the Admiralty in London had designed and maintained an
incentive system and contracts for its officers, that, on a priori grounds
could be represented as superior to the systems of rival navies also
remains to be investigated, perhaps in the vocabularies of tournament
and other incentive theories displayed in the mathematical forms
discussed by economists. 53
Meanwhile the efforts of the Lords of the Admiralty to recruit and
retain talented and ambitious young men received support from the high
and rising status that society accorded to posts in the Navy. For good
reasons “Britons” rejoiced in their floating fortresses and the public
certainly conferred approbation on the officers and seamen for defending
the realm, protecting commerce and for the delivery of value for the
money that they surrendered as taxes. 54 An increasingly xenophobic
52
R. Lavery, Nelson’s Navy and A. Guimera, ‘Some Notes on the Superiority of the
Royal Navy in the Eighteenth Century’ (unpublished letter of 29 January 2009)
53
E. Jenkins, A History of the French navy (London, 1973); J. Glete, Navies and
Nations; D. Goodman, Spanish Naval Power; (Cambridge, 1996), J. Bruijn, The Dutch
Navy of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (New York, 1993) and C. Menard
and M. Shirley (eds.),Handbook for New Institutional Economics (Boston, 2005). I am
indebted to conversations with two outstanding naval historians, Dan Baugh and
Augustin Guimera on this point.
54
P. O’Brien, ‘Fiscal Exceptionalism: Great Britain and its European Rivals from Civil
War to Triumph at Trafalgar and Waterloo’, in D. Winch and P. O’Brien (eds.), The
Political Economy of British Historical Experience 1658-1914 (Oxford, 2002)
26
nation became entranced with the power of their navy to inflict a long
series of humiliating defeats on Catholic enemies and economic
competitors. Almost nobody inside or outside Parliament questioned the
need to spend ever increasing sums of money to construct, man and
maintain warships that, as records of victories at sea and balance sheets
of ships lost, destroyed and captured show, remained decade after
decade superior to the achievements of rival navies. 55 Monarchs,
ministers, Parliament, clergy, the press, poets, novelists, playwrights and
the public at large displayed nothing but pride in the officers and seamen
who defended their liberties, religion, properties and interests overseas.
Tropes, images, medals, paintings, fictional heroes celebrating
Britannia’s “rule of the waves” its “ship of state”, “gallant officers” and
“jolly jack tars” proliferated across the classes and testify to a patriotic
consensus of social approbation for a dominant, ostensibly well managed
and victorious navy, long before Nelson appeared on the scene to provide
more than a century of security for Britain and its empire that followed
from “final” victory at Trafalgar. 56
That popularity did not translate either into the repeal of
impressment, higher wages for seamen, or to generous salaries for a
gallant corps of officers. As apprentices, midshipmen who, along with all
other officers, purchased their own food and clothing, existed for years on
virtually the same “real wage” as an able seaman. That was somewhere
between 30 and 45 shillings a month and roughly equivalent to levels of
remuneration in money and kind, paid to agricultural labourers. Before
revisions in pay in 1797 and 1806, lieutenants received 112 to 140
shillings a month and captains 168 to 560 shillings, depending on the
55
D. Hepper, British Warship Losses in the Age of Sail 1650-1859 (East Sussex,
1994)
56
M. Lincoln, Representing the Royal Navy. British Sea Power, 1750-1815 (Aldershot,
2002)
27
scale of armaments that the ships they commanded carried. Only
commissioned officers received half pay when they were “on call” on
shore. 57
Apart from acquiring status as “warriors” and aspiring “gentry” in
the service of their king and country, the most widely publicized incentive
for young men already born some way up the social scale to pursue
careers in the Royal Navy was the prospect of making fortunes from the
capture and sale of “prizes” particularly rival warships, but also, with
considerably less risk, enemy merchant vessels with their cargoes as well
as helpless neutrals suspected of running “contraband” to Britain’s
enemies in wartime. Given that the scale of rewards that could accrue
from the capture of hostile ships and their cargoes, were carefully
calibrated by rank and that failures to engage with enemy warships
could be severely punished as cowardice, it seems that the Admiralties of
the day maintained in place a clear progression of material incentives that
prima facie provided “significant encouragement” for midshipmen to
endure six or seven years on low pay to make it to lieutenant and for an
elastic supply of commissioned lieutenants to compete for preferment and
patronage from their professional peers in order to receive the call to take
command of warships, preferably frigates, of the scale and/or speed
likely to capture valuable prizes, and for captains to impress admirals and
the Admiralty with loyalty, and above all, with personal records of victories
and captures to suggest that they might be entrusted to move to the apex
of the pyramid and command entire squadrons and even fleets of
warships. 58
57
N. Rodger, Command of the Ocean and Baugh, Eighteenth Century Navy (London,
2004)
58
R. Hill, Prizes of War: Prize Law and the Royal Navy in the Napoleonic Wars 17931815 (London, 1999) and R. Morris, Naval Power and British Culture. Public Trust and
government Ideology (Aldershot, 2004)
28
Although scales for incentives changed over time the principles
maintained are captured by “modal” percentages that indicate that around
half of all prize money flowing as rewards for naval successes at sea
accrued to admirals and captains, a further 25% to other commissioned
officers, 12.5% to warrant officers and the rest to the crews of victorious
ships. Thus the distribution of rewards looks redolent of incentive and
bonus systems maintained by modern Anglo-American business
corporations, and reified until recently by some economists from those
cultures as optimal for efficiency. Whether the Royal Navy’s prize or
tournament system playing on the decisions of its officers can be
represented as a peculiarly “British” institution that made some
appreciable difference to the efficient delivery of violence at sea or varied
in significant and ostensibly positive ways from comparable systems
maintained by French, Spanish, Dutch and other rival navies, has not yet
been clarified. 59
British naval historians are inclined to assert that among the officer
classes who managed European fleets, service with the Royal Navy
tended to confer higher rewards, status and job satisfaction at lower
levels of risk from disease and violent death in action than service with
rival navies. Many have also represented naval warfare as a process
where repeated victories at sea cumulated into a “culture” of aggressive
and successful risk taking of the “entrepreneurial” style displayed by
Nelson and his captains at Trafalgar. 60 Perhaps such “cultures” of
success breeding more success are not given the weight they warrant in
59
D. Benjamin and A. Tifrea, ‘Learning by Dying: Combat Performance in the Age of
Sail’, in Journal of Economic History, 67 (2007) pp. 968-1001; M. Verge-Franchesci,
Les officiers generaux de la marine royale, 1715-74 (Paris, 1990); J. Bruijn, Dutch
Navy and D.C. Goodman, Spanish naval power, 1589-1665; reconstruction and
defeat (Cambridge, 1997); Augustin Guimera thinks it was compared to Spain
60
T. Wareham, The Star Captains Frigate Command in the Napoleonic Wars
(Annapolis, 2001)
29
economic models for behaviour based upon material incentives. 61 In
recent years more naval historians, led by Nicholas Rodger, have,
however, moved on to debate a wider view of navies and one more
congenial to economic historians which hypothesizes that at the top of
any list of competitive advantages enjoyed by the Royal Navy over rival
fleets was the extent and depth of the realm’s domestic resources and
organizational capabilities mobilized and coordinated by the state, to
construct, arm, man and maintain an increasingly large fleet of warships
at sea for protracted periods of time. 62
Clear and persistently higher levels of combined public and private
investment in an infra-structure of buildings, docks, cranes, scaffolding,
stores, tools, inventories of raw materials and efficiently managed
shipyards, employing elastic supplies of labour skilled in the arts of
designing, building, repairing and maintaining all kinds of ships (including
warships for the Royal Navy) surely cumulated between 1651 and 1815
into a significant comparative advantage for British trade and the British
economy. 63
Effective maritime power presupposed that navies could call upon
elastic and lower cost supplies of the fixed capital, knowledge,
technologies, raw materials, weapons, victuals, seamen, marines and all
other inputs required to keep fleets of warships at/or ready for
engagements with enemies at sea. In Britain naval demands declined,
but never fell back to previous levels, even in interludes of peace, when
breaks in connexions and learning curves could well have reduced
productivity, particularly for those all important turnabout times for repairs
61
B. Tunstall and N. Tracy (eds.), Naval Warfare in the Age of Sail. The Evolution of
Fighting Tactics, 1650-1815 Annapolis, 1990) and A. Mahon, Types of Naval Officers
Drawn from the History of the British Navy (Boston, 1904). This is Dan Baugh’s view
62
J. Keegan, The Price of Admiralty: War at Sea from Man of War to Submarine
(London, 1988) and Rodger, Command of the Ocean
63
P.K. O’Brien and X.Duran, The Royal Navy and the Industrial Revolution
30
and refurbishment , which became vital in wartime when the pressures to
keep warships constantly at sea intensified. 64
Nevertheless, the hypothesis under review here is not the relative
scales and scope of on-shore logistical support systems and
organizations embedded in the societies, economies and political
systems of Europe’s ancien regimes, but their relative efficiencies. Across
Europe, maritime powers maintained complex public organizations,
ministries, admiralties, boards, directorates, commissions and other
agencies of state, at the centre of a process, to turn to economics jargon,
of transforming inputs into outputs in order to fulfil missions at sea. 65
In command of capital owned and workforces employed by the
state, or more commonly, operating as bureaucratically organized
coordinators working with private firms, the naval agencies of European
states were charged by royal rulers, advised by aristocratic oligarchies or
Parliaments of notables, with responsibilities for building, hiring, repairing
and maintaining warships, for procuring their cannon, ammunition and
small arms, for supplying victuals, stores, tools, spare parts and other
inputs necessary to maintain fleets at sea. Logistical support systems
required for Europe’s national navies aspired, notwithstanding the case of
the Netherlands and its five admiralties, to become competent,
specialized and efficient parts of a centralized command system,
embodying various types of organization producing naval power in
combined public and public ownership and exemplifying very different
rules and practices for the coordination and collaboration required
64
M. Duffy (ed.), Parameters of British Naval Power (Exeter, 1992)
J. Wilson, Bureaucracy. What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It (New
York, 1989)
65
31
between governments and private enterprise in order to supply and
service national navies. 66
Every European navy can be represented as a more or less
efficient partnership between a national state and a network of domestic
private enterprises. Although states like Britain and the Dutch Republic
with larger maritime sectors enjoyed a greater range of competitive
options for collaboration, it will be difficult, even when the vast
bibliography of historical literatures dealing with the operations of
European ministries, admiralties, boards, commissions and other
agencies established by states to mobilize and sustain navies is laid side
by side, to reach valid conclusions about their relative levels of efficiency
that are more than informed and negotiable judgments. 67
Since properly designed exercises in productivity measurement are
out of the questions, the view that navies of the Netherlands and Britain
which were based upon large and increasing maritime sectors enjoyed
lower cost services from their infrastructures on shore are again plausible
only as conjectures. 68 At present two provisional hypotheses, based
upon a perusal of recent histories of the ministries, bureaucracies and
agencies and firms concerned with the management of and supplies for
navies in early modern Europe can be hazarded.
First, that all public organizations involved with the construction,
mobilization, coordination and administration of the warships and other
resources required by fleets to become formidable at sea seem to have
been afflicted, some more than others, with all the vices of ancien
regimes, long familiar to historians – but now expressed in the importable
66
H. Bowen and A. Gonzalez-Encisco (eds.), Mobilizing Resources for War. Britain and
Spain at Working during the Early Modern Period (Pamplona, 2006)
67
R. Sanchez-Torres (ed.), War, State and Development. Fiscal Military States in the
Eighteenth Century (Pamplona, 2007)
68
J. Black and P. Woodfine (eds.), The British Navy and Use of Naval Power in the
Eighteenth Century (Leicester, 1988)
32
taxonomies and vocabularies of new institutional economics. 69
Corruption, rent seeking, percolation, moral hazards, adverse selection,
principle agent problems of every conceivable kind obstructed the
command and incentive systems for the execution of missions assigned
to navies all the way down the line from rulers at the top through
ministries, admiralties, boards and other departments of state to officers
on the quarter deck. 70
Second, the voluminous historiography of British naval
administration, glowing with the success of its fleet, does not suggest that
the kingdom’s Parliamentary regime, a supposedly optimal constitution for
liberty with economic efficiency, could without closer investigation be
plausibly represented as clearly more superior in sustaining effective
naval administrations than autocratic Spain, absolutist France or the
decentralized administration favoured by the Dutch republic. 71 British
naval historians, together with neo-liberal economists, might wish, and
indeed may assume, that to be the case. But it is not proven that the
Admiralty and its several subsidiary Boards (acting, much of the time, as
fiefdoms) effectively managed the construction, procurement and
maintenance of warships; controlled the hire of vessels for transportation,
victualled fleets, cared for sick and wounded seamen, solved the
problems of coordination, control and collaboration with private firms or
successfully aligned systems of incentives with their specialized missions
for defence of the realm and the kingdom’s mercantilist objectives in ways
69
D. Benjamin and C. Thornberg, ‘Organization and Incentives in the Age of Sail’; M.
Palmer, ‘The Sails Right Hand: Command and Central in the Age of Fighting Sail,
1652-1827’
70
C. Menard and M. Shirley, eds., New Institutional Economics (Boston 2005).
71
B. Morris, Naval Power and British Culture; J. Dull, The French Navy and American
Independence: A Study of Arms and Diplomacy (Princeton, 1975); J. Dull, The French
Navy and the Seven Years War. France Overseas. Studies in Empire and
Decolonization (Chesham, 2005);
33
that were clearly more efficient than the systems operated by their foes
and European rivals. 72
After 1815 when nineteenth century political reformers engaged
seriously with the clean up of “old corruption” they found nothing
exceptional to praise in departments of state responsible for the navy.
Many new institutional economic historians like the idea that
Parliamentary regimes established more efficient departments of state
and bureaucracies than their “despotic” rivals. Yet investigations by
Parliamentary commissions and later by historians of the administrations
running the navy, the army and most other departments of the
Hanoverian-early Victorian state have found all the malign features of
early modern governance to be as commonplace in Britain as the rest of
Europe. 73 Sir Lewis Namier and his school, who at least understood the
nature of politics, patronage and bureaucracy under an ancien regime,
suggested that British administration worked better than regimes on the
mainland because a Parliamentary system allowed more scope for
private enterprise and for the misappropriation of taxpayers’ money,
which at least got things done. In other words , at that time rents may
well have been a higher component of public expenditure under
Parliamentary than monarchical constitutions - persistently strapped for
cash and more dependent upon aristocratic traditions of noble behaviour
and service to the Crown. 74
Political historians will recognize, but economists may not, all such
inefficient features of early modern public administration as endemic to
the transition from decentralized polities to Weberian states and from
72
D. North and B. Weingast, ‘Constitutions and Commitments: the Evolution of
Institutions Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth Century England’, in Journal of
Economic History, 49 (1989), pp. 803-832
73
P. Mandler, Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform (Cambridge, 1990)
74
L. Namier, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (London, 1961)
and M.A. Oppenheim, A History of the Administration of the Royal Navy (Hanover,
1961)
34
crude to modern forms of management for large scale complex
bureaucratic organizations with multiple missions and objectives. 75
Before the nineteenth century revolutions in transport and
communications and the diffusion of organizational systems and
techniques to communicate, monitor and audit commands and
information from central governments, all European states continued to
act as “coordinators” of the authority and “mobilizers” of the resources
required to sustain fleets of warships at sea or armies in the field.
76
Whatever claims kings made to divine rights, absolute obedience or their
parliaments of rich and self-interested notables asserted about
sovereignty derived from the people, their capabilities for action remained
bounded, much less by constitutional forms, and much more by
technologically constrained imperfections in the organizational techniques
available to implement policies and strategies efficiently. 77
Economic
historians are now pursuing hypotheses that suggest that ancien regimes
that let in markets seem to have worked better than those who tried to
deliver more autocratic and honest governance. Nevertheless, all states
(Britain much less so than any of its rivals) were fundamentally
constrained by the lack of fiscal and financial resources to pay both the
opportunity costs and the “rents” necessary to construct, mobilize and run
an effective navy. 78
Meanwhile this particular historical narrative, constructed around
the familiar concepts and scaffolding of a macro production function,
75
R. Ekelund and R. Tollison, eds., Politicized Economics, Monarchy, Monopoly and
Mercantilism (College Station, Texas, 1997)
76
Sanchez-Torres, ed., War, State and Development and N. Baker, Government and
Contractors. The British treasury and War Supplies (London, 1971)
77
D. North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (Cambridge,
1990)
78
Elaborated in P. O’Brien, ‘The History, Nature and Economic Significance of an
Exceptional Fiscal State for the Growth of the British Economy, 1453-1815
(forthcoming in Economic History Review, 2010)
35
offers nothing more than the following brief prospectus of plausible but
speculative hypotheses for refinement and research.
First, the rise of British naval supremacy from 1652 was path
dependant and linked by loops of inter-connexions to the growth of the
economy. Second, politically, the development of a strong navy depended
upon a slow evolution (1453-1649) of a maritime strategy for the off-shore
defence of an island realm, coupled with a relatively small army, which
was deployed to maintain internal order in a less than united and
potentially ungovernable kingdom. Third, the fiscal and financial
institutions and political consensus for a sustained uplift in state
expenditures on the largest standing fleet of warships in Europe was
created during an interregnum of Republican rule, carried forward by the
Stuarts and exploited to reach its full potential between the Glorious
Revolution (1688) and the Congress of Vienna (1815). Fourth, the
development and consolidation of the realm’s extensive maritime sector
was protected by the Royal Navy which, in turn, promoted and sustained
the largest fleet of battleships on call for defence and aggression in
Europe and across the oceans of the world economy. Fifth, claims by
British naval historians that the long run geopolitical and imperial success
of the Royal Navy could be imputed to British technology, superior
seamanship, bravery in battle, tactical knowledge, the Nelson factor, well
designed economic incentives, more efficient logistical support and
organizational capacities are, if such things could be quantified, prima
facie unlikely to have generated the kind of a large, residual, implied by
narratives of success that flow from the production of historical writing
upon a provincialized and national basis. Sixth, British naval and
mercantile superiority can best be represented as the product of
combined investment by the private and public sectors in a combined
strategy for security, internal order and the extension of a well subsidized
36
merchant marine sector that led the economy towards a plateau of
possibilities for precocious industrialization.
Finally, this narrative (which remains negotiable) represents the
institutions and culture promoting the First Industrial Revolution as an
outcome of successful policies to promote domestic trade, shipping and
commercial services required for the expansion of exports, imports and
re-exports makes more plausible sense than its representation as the
paradigm case for parliamentary governance, liberty, democracy and
private enterprise. The historical story behind the comparative
advantages enjoyed by the British economy in the wake of an era of
“mercantilist” policies to promote overseas commerce and
industrialization emanated from kinetic energy and high wages,
combined with geopolitical, power that is from coal and the Royal Navy.
Though that thought may be heretical it certainly leaves less space to
“economic and social histories from below”, but restores geopolitical
strategy, fiscal policy and geographical endowments to a central place in
British economic history. It is, we suggest, the reductionist position upon
which Bob Allen’s recent reinterpretation of the Industrial Revolution may
come to rest. 79
79
R. C. Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (Cambridge,
2009)
37
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44
LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS
ECONOMIC HISTORY DEPARTMENT WORKING PAPERS
(from 2006 onwards) For a full list of titles visit our webpage at
http://www.lse.ac.uk/
2006
WP93
Harbingers of Dissolution? Grain Prices, Borders and
Nationalism in the Hapsburg Economy before the First World
War
Max-Stephan Schulze and Nikolaus Wolf
WP94
Rodney Hilton, Marxism and the Transition from Feudalism to
Capitalism
S. R. Epstein
Forthcoming in C. Dyer, P. Cross, C. Wickham (eds.)
Rodney Hilton’s Middle Ages, 400-1600 Cambridge UP 2007
WP95
Mercantilist Institutions for the Pursuit of Power with Profit. The
Management of Britain’s National Debt, 1756-1815
Patrick Karl O’Brien
WP96
Gresham on Horseback: The Monetary Roots of Spanish
American Political Fragmentation in the Nineteenth Century
Maria Alejandra Irigoin
2007
WP97
An Historical Analysis of the Expansion of Compulsory
Schooling in Europe after the Second World War
Martina Viarengo
WP98
Universal Banking Failure? An Analysis of the Contrasting
Responses of the Amsterdamsche Bank and the
Rotterdamsche Bankvereeniging to the Dutch Financial Crisis of
the 1920s
Christopher Louis Colvin
WP99
The Triumph and Denouement of the British Fiscal State:
Taxation for the Wars against Revolutionary and Napoleonic
France, 1793-1815.
Patrick Karl O’Brien
WP100
Origins of Catch-up Failure: Comparative Productivity Growth in
the Hapsburg Empire, 1870-1910
Max-Stephan Schulze
WP101
Was Dick Whittington Taller Than Those He Left Behind?
Anthropometric Measures, Migration and the Quality of life in
Early Nineteenth Century London
Jane Humphries and Tim Leunig
WP102
The Evolution of Entertainment Consumption and the
Emergence of Cinema, 1890-1940
Gerben Bakker
WP103
Is Social Capital Persistent? Comparative Measurement in the
Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Marta Felis Rota
WP104
Structural Change and the Growth Contribution of Services:
How Motion Pictures Industrialized US Spectator Entertainment
Gerben Bakker
WP105
The Jesuits as Knowledge Brokers Between Europe and China
(1582-1773): Shaping European Views of the Middle Kingdom
Ashley E. Millar
WP106
Regional Income Dispersion and Market Potential in the Late
Nineteenth Century Habsburg Empire
Max-Stephan Schulze
2008
WP107
‘The Big Problem of the Petty Coins’, and how it could be
solved in the late Middle Ages
Oliver Volckart
WP108
The Anglo-German Industrial Productivity Puzzle, 1895-1935: A
Restatement and a Possible Resolution
Albrecht Ritschl
WP109
The History, Nature and Economic Significance of an
Exceptional Fiscal State for the Growth of the British Economy,
1453-1815
Patrick O’Brien
WP110
The Economic History of Sovereignty: Communal
Responsibility, the Extended Family, and the Firm
Lars Boerner and Albrecht Ritschl
WP111
A Stakeholder Empire: The Political Economy of Spanish
Imperial Rule in America
Regina Grafe and Alejandra Irigoin
WP112
The U.S. Business Cycle, 1867-1995: Dynamic Factor Analysis
vs. Reconstructed National Accounts
Albrecht Ritschl, Samad Sarferaz and Martin Uebele
WP113
Understanding West German Economic Growth in the 1950s
Barry Eichengreen and Albrecht Ritschl
2009
WP114
War and Wealth: Economic Opportunity Before and After the
Civil War, 1850-1870
Taylor Jaworski
WP115
Business Cycles and Economic Policy, 1914-1945: A Survey
Albrecht Ritschl and Tobias Straumann
WP116
The Impact of School Provision on Pupil Attendance: Evidence
From the Early 20th Century
Mary MacKinnon and Chris Minns
WP117
Why Easter Island Collapsed: An Answer for an Enduring
Question
Barzin Pakandam
WP118
Rules and Reality: Quantifying the Practice of Apprenticeship in
Early Modern Europe
Chris Minns and Patrick Wallis
WP119
Time and Productivity Growth in Services: How Motion Pictures
Industrialized Entertainment
Gerben Bakker
WP120
The Pattern of Trade in Seventeenth-Century Mughal India:
Towards An Economic Explanation
Jagjeet Lally
WP121
Bairoch Revisited. Tariff Structure and Growth in the Late 19th
Century
Antonio Tena-Junguito
WP122
Evolution of Living Standards and Human Capital in China in
18-20th Centuries: Evidences from Real Wage and
Anthropometrics
Joerg Baten, Debin Ma, Stephen Morgan and Qing Wang
WP123
Wages, Prices, and Living Standards in China, 1738-1925: in
Comparison with Europe, Japan, and India
Robert C. Allen, Jean-Pascal Bassino, Debin Ma, Christine
Moll-Murata, Jan Luiten van Zanden
WP124
Law and Economic Change in Traditional China: A Comparative
Perspective
Debin Ma
WP125
Leaving Home and Entering Service: The Age of
Apprenticeship in Early Modern London
Patrick Wallis, Cliff Webb and Chris Minns
WP126
After the Great Debasement, 1544-51: Did Gresham’s Law
Apply?
Ling-Fan Li
WP127
Did Globalization Aid Industrial Development in Colonial India?
A Study of Knowledge Transfer in the Iron Industry
Tirthankar Roy
WP128
The Education and Training of Gentry Sons in Early-Modern
England
Patrick Wallis and Cliff Webb
WP129
Does Trade Explain Europe’s Rise? Geography, Market Size
and Economic Development
Roman Studer
WP130
Depression Econometrics: A FAVAR Model of Monetary Policy
During the Great Depression
Pooyan Amir Ahmadi and Albrecht Ritschl
WP131
The Economic Legacies of the ‘Thin White Line’: Indirect Rule
and the Comparative Development of Sub-Saharan Africa
Peter Richens
WP132
Money, States and Empire: Financial Integration Cycles and
Institutional Change in Central Europe, 1400-1520
David Chilosi and Oliver Volckart
WP133
Regional Market Integration in Italy During the Unification
(1832-1882)
Anna Missiaia
2010
WP134
Total Factor Productivity for the Royal Navy from Victory at
Texal (1653) to Triumph at Trafalgar (1805)
Patrick Karl O’Brien FBA and Xavier Duran